Effect of High Temperature and Inclination Angle on Mechanical Properties and Fracture Behavior of Granite at Low Strain Rate

Abstract

Comprehensive understanding of the effects of temperature and inclination angle on mechanical properties and fracture modes of rock is essential for the design of rock engineering under complex loads, such as the construction of nuclear waste repository, geothermal energy development and stability assessment of deep pillar. In this paper, a novel inclined uniaxial compression (inclined UCS) test system was introduced to carry out two series of inclined uniaxial compression tests on granite specimens under various inclination angles (0–20°) and treated temperatures (25–800 °C) at 5° inclination. Experimental results revealed that the peak compression stress and elastic modulus gradually decreased, while peak shear stress increased nonlinearly with the increasing inclination angle; the peak compression and shear stress as well as elastic modulus slightly increased from 25 to 200 °C, then gradually decreased onwards with the increasing temperature. The effect of temperature on peak axial strain was the same as that on peak shear displacement. Acoustic emission (AE) results suggested that the relationship between crack initiation stress, inclination angle and treated temperature followed a similar trend as that of the peak compression stress and elastic modulus. Particularly, the crack initiation (CI) stress threshold and shear stress corresponding to CI threshold under 800 °C were only 7.4% of that under 200 °C and revealed a severe heat damage phenomenon, which was consistent with the results of the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with the appearance of a large number of thermal pores observed only under 800 °C. The failure modes tended to shear failure with the increasing inclination angle, indicating that the shear stress component can accelerate sliding instability of rocks. On the other hand, the failure patterns with different temperatures changed from combined splitting-shear failure (25–400 °C) to single shear failure (600 and 800 °C). The study results can provide an extremely important reference for underground thermal engineering construction under complex loading environment.